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The Museum of Inuit Art has an amazing team of over 30 volunteers that offer their time and expertise to support many areas of our operations—public programs, visitor services, website development, collections management, and marketing to name a few. In 2013 our volunteers contributed nearly 4,888 hours to our organization. That is the equivalent of the hours worked by 2.5 full-time staff members in a given year! We are truly grateful for their support. Throughout National Volunteer Appreciation Week will be celebrating the contributions of our amazing volunteer team during 2013.

We have such a fantastic team here at the museum, it is hard to capture all the wonderful people involved but we’ve selected a few of our current and past volunteers in a variety of roles to speak about their experience being a part of the MIA family!

Julia E.

Julia Extance is currently volunteering at the museum at our front desk focusing on visitor services. She began volunteering with us in December 2013 and since then has been very proactive in helping us get our front desk organized into an effective workspace. Every day she comes to staff with new ideas that we are slowing implementing at the front desk. The latest initiative put forth by Julia is her proposal to take on a project to track visitation to the museum, which will be of great assistance to staff when scheduling our programs and events!

Why did you decide to volunteer with the Museum of Inuit Art?

I graduated university recently and have been unable to find a job so I wanted to start volunteering for some organization long term in order to help out my resume. Luckily the MIA is a fun and interesting place to volunteer, so now it’s less about making my resume look good and more about genuinely contributing to a Canadian cultural institution.

Describe your experience so far with MIA.

My experience so far has been very pleasant. Everyone who works and volunteers here is nice; everyone who visits is nice; it’s a nice museum. Even when there are not many visitors I read or clean the lobby so there’s always something to do.

What was the most memorable or rewarding moment that you have had while volunteering with the museum?

Cleaning out the craft supplies and seeing all the fun materials we have, and then seeing it all neatly put back on the shelves and hearing from an Arts Assistant that it was easier to find stuff now that it’s better organized.

What have you learned from your experience with the museum thus far?

One thing I’ve learned is how to apply quite specific skills I’ve learned in university from the subject of statistics and apply it to other fields for different projects. The Visitor Tally project that I’m responsible for is not very complicated but completely relies on having a basic knowledge of statistics and methods of data collection and analysis, so it was exciting for me to actually use those skills in everyday practice.

What are you doing now?

Still looking for a job, and still volunteering. And thinking of more ways to make the Visitor Service Volunteers tasks more organized.

If you are interested in learning more about our Visitor Services volunteer opportunity at the museum, visit our website . We are always looking for people to join our team!